Olpasbet, the Prison City
Olpasbet, the Prison City
Aslan stopped dead.
His breath caught. He didn't blink. He just stared blankly at the window floating before his eyes.
Twelve years was not a short time.
Those twelve years had been brutal, and even if they amounted to less than half a human lifetime, the weight of that suffering could not be dismissed.
For Aslan, the mere act of revisiting those years was agony. And the appearance of a main quest—that was incomprehensible.
Who was Angela Tail?
Why was a main quest manifesting now?
He could make no sense of it.
What his sluggish mind could tell him was that the first main quest began here, in the Prison City of Olpasbet.
This was not his first visit to Olpasbet.
None of those previous visits had ever triggered a main quest.
If there was a difference between then and now—
His thoughts reached that point just as his eyes registered the girl, and in that same instant, she clashed with the men.
Crack!
Specifically, the stone clutched in the girl's hand swung in a tight arc.
She was not tall, but the rock she swung with a full extension caught one man cleanly across the side of the skull.
The man, mid-charge, took the blow to the temple and clutched his head.
But he only staggered. He did not fall. He bared his teeth and lunged.
"You goddamn little bitch!"
He came on with a curse, snatching her wrist with contemptuous ease. Pride had slowed his reaction, but the girl's limbs were pitifully thin.
'There's no way she breaks free.'
Aslan judged the outcome and stepped forward. What would follow was already clear in his mind. This was the moment to intervene.
But contrary to his expectation, the girl moved.
She saw the raised fist and lunged forward.
Crunch!
She sank her teeth into the arm that held her wrist.
A filthy tactic, but its effectiveness was undeniable. She clamped down with her eyes squeezed shut, and blood welled from the man's forearm.
"Aagh—let go, let go! I said let go!"
The man screamed and swung his fist. The blow hammered into the girl's head at near point-blank range.
Whud. Whud. Each impact against her scarlet hair produced a dull sound, but the girl refused to yield, eyes glaring wide as she bit down harder.
"Grrrrhk—aaagh!"
When the man finally released her wrist, the girl drove a knee upward. Her knee smashed squarely into his groin.
"Gurk!"
The man collapsed with a single choked cry, and the girl grinned through her disheveled scarlet hair. The crowd jeered at the fallen man with raucous laughter.
Only the dragon-kin remained.
But the dragon-kin merely stood with arms folded, looking down at her without any sign of haste.
Aslan read two things in that composed stance.
One was the dragon-kin's confidence.
The other was his eye for measure.
This was not simply a large demi-human brute. The dragon-kin was a warrior.
A warrior seasoned enough to weigh an opponent's fighting strength against his own and foresee the outcome.
And the warrior apparently found no reason whatsoever to hurry.
The girl had toppled his underlings with luck and dirty tricks, but against a dragon-kin towering over two meters, she had no path to victory. That much was plain.
The girl seemed to realize it too. Her fierce grin was gradually fading.
The dragon-kin read her expression and spoke.
"Angela Tail. Was my offer so unpleasant?"
She gave no answer, instead bending to pick up another stone from the ground. Even with a weapon in hand, the dragon-kin showed little concern.
His gaze held arrogance as he looked down at her.
"Is it so offensive, the offer to take a gutter runt under my protection?"
The girl's face flickered with contempt and fury at his words and expression. The hand not holding the stone trembled. Then she shouted.
"Then of course it bloody is, you gods-damned lizard bastard!"
And she hurled the stone with all the anger in her.
The cleanly thrown rock sliced through the air with a hiss toward the dragon-kin, who caught it negligently.
It struck his broad palm with a soft thump and rolled to the ground.
The dragon-kin exhaled a sigh.
"Angela Tail, must I truly draw blood befo—"
He stopped mid-word.
The girl who should have been in front of him was gone.
The crowd's eyes were fixed behind him. He spun around, belatedly snapping to alertness.
The girl had fled while he was distracted by the thrown stone. Her running figure was still visible, not far ahead.
The dragon-kin's brow furrowed with displeasure, and he began to give chase. The crowd, watching the girl and her pursuer, erupted into idle chatter.
In the confusion, only Aslan tracked her escape route before silently slipping into an open alley branching off to the side.
*
"Hah, hah, hff."
The girl ran. Behind her, a dragon-kin three heads taller followed with long, loping strides, his massive tail swaying for balance as he leaned into the sprint.
She shoved aside whoever appeared in her path, and those shoved threw themselves out of the way to avoid colliding with the dragon-kin. That was how she managed to keep the distance from closing entirely.
'He's, he's gaining on me!'
She was a gutterborn.
She had been born and raised in the dragon-kin city called Belus Alpen.
Who birthed her, how she came into existence—she had never known. Since her earliest memories, she had lived in the slums of Belus Alpen.
For a girl like her, the surname Tail had been a matter of course.
The dragon-kin city sprawled beneath the skeleton of a colossal dragon said to be an Ancient God, and its districts were divided by the dragon's anatomy, marking social rank.
The most wretched and lowly in that city were those packed into the slums of the Tail.
They were all Tails.
And every Tail was human.
No great size, no tails, no superior physical gifts—just humans.
Considering that the city's nobility consisted entirely of dragon-kin, it was hardly a peculiar arrangement.
The girl hated dragon-kin.
She scrapped and snarled with other Tails every day over scraps of food, but she loathed the dragon-kin more.
The arrogant looks they leveled at her, as though gazing upon something base.
She could not stand it.
The way they recoiled as if she were filth disgusted her.
The casual way they treated Tails like livestock to be managed disgusted her.
For a girl like her, rebelling against a dragon-kin who commanded her to serve under him was the only natural response.
Personal distaste played a part, but what repulsed her most was the absence of any notion of equality.
"Hff, huk, ngh."
So she rebelled, and she fought. Even if the result was futile.
She forced down the breath rising to her throat and kept her legs pumping. She cut across the street stained crimson by the light and rounded a corner.
Thud.
"Nnghk!"
The moment she rounded the corner, her foot caught a loose stone and she went down.
The impact jarred her body, and the breath she had been fighting turned to nausea. She clamped a hand over her mouth and coughed.
The pounding of the dragon-kin's footsteps drew steadily closer. She ground her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut.
Just as the footfalls reached directly behind her—
"Wha—?!"
Someone seized her wrist and pulled. Off balance, she was hauled helplessly into a back alley.
Whoever it was pressed a hand over her mouth and pushed her back against a wall. The abrupt shift in circumstance made her eyes fly open.
"Shh."
Through her widened eyes she saw a man.
A black-haired man two heads taller than her, with a distinctive gleam in his teal eyes.
An exhausted complexion coexisting with a somber, almost mournful expression. He held her against the wall, one finger to his own lips, signaling silence.
A reflexive surge of resentment rose in her, but—
"Damn it all... lost her."
Before she could so much as twitch, the dragon-kin's voice sounded nearby, and her resistance subsided.
She heard that voice, understood the situation, and swallowed her resentment with a scowl.
'He helped me?'
Only after the dragon-kin's footsteps faded into the distance did he release her wrist and remove the hand covering her mouth.
"That was close."
As he said, she had been moments from capture.
What would have happened if she had been caught was unclear, but it certainly would not have brought her any joy.
The assistance was plainly something to be grateful for, yet the girl still frowned as she regarded the man before her. Her golden eyes rippled with wariness.
"Who the hell are you?"
She did not know this man. There was no reason she would.
She had not been imprisoned here for long, so she knew few among the incarcerated.
The truth was that the only people she knew were the fellow gutterborn hired alongside her back in Belus Alpen.
Most of those gutterborn were dead, and her employer was dead too. The likelihood that this man was anyone she knew was slim.
She had not stayed long in this city, but she had already learned that it held few decent souls—perhaps none at all.
"Why did you help me?"
She assumed he had an ulterior motive. She expected him to demand something.
"Because getting caught seemed like a bad outcome."
He answered without hesitation.
And with that answer, he fell silent.
His mouth stayed closed as though that truly were the whole of it.
When she twitched an eyebrow in disbelief, he added.
"I was watching. Saw you fighting that dragon-kin's men."
At that, her expression grew even more skeptical.
Throughout her entire flight, she had never glimpsed another pursuer.
To get ahead of both her and the dragon-kin and wait in this alley, he would have had to run at an unthinkable speed.
Perhaps reading her doubt, the man tilted his head toward the alley's interior.
The alley ran deep before dead-ending at a wall that jutted out in irregular sections.
It was not especially high. Clamberable, if one could find a grip and pull themselves over.
The girl studied the wall, then turned back. The man spoke.
"Once I saw which direction you were running, I figured you'd come this way. So I cut straight across. Nothing to be surprised about."
She frowned.
She could not tell if such a thing was possible.
But he seemed to think further explanation was unnecessary. He took a step back from her.
"Fight or not, I didn't feel like watching a group of men gang up on one person."
An incomprehensible reason. She opened her mouth to challenge it, then closed it.
Grrrrrowl.
What cut off her protest was none other than herself.
Specifically, her own body.
At the thunderous sound from her stomach, she pressed her lips tight and dropped her gaze.
"...You're hungry."
The man gave a small, understanding nod.
"Want to get something to eat?"
Watching the girl study him in silence, he thought to himself.
He was not going to miss this opportunity. The main quest had finally appeared.